Yet Another Reason Why the Euro Is Doomed

The euro crisis is already concrete in everyday life in the debtor nations, but it remains abstract in the donor nations. Imposing hardship on the northern citizenry to “save” the euro is politically impossible because the “gains” from the hardship are theoretical while the hardships will be immediate and real.

I have previously discussed the many profound financial reasons why the euro is doomed. But there is another political/financial reason why the euro’s unraveling is inevitable. To understand this dynamic, we must start with this reality: in the wealthy countries of the north, the crisis is abstract; there is so much wealth and apparent financial stability, the notion that some sort of real-world hardship could actually spread from the southern Eurozone to the north is simply impossible to grasp.

In the nations impacted directly by the crisis, there is nothing abstract about the unraveling; it is now part of everyday experience.

We can distill this profound disconnect between the abstract (northern member nations) and the concrete (southern member nations) down to a simple question: how can leaders of still prosperous nations to whom the crisis is completely abstract in terms of daily life possibly make the kinds of decisions needed to impose hardship on their populations for a “cause”–“saving the euro”–which has no apparent connection to their everyday lives?